It's funny how some moments in our lives stand out with remarkable clarity. I can still remember the exact location of the first time the subject of personal computers came up in our house. The year was 1986 and my mother and I were in the living room, the afternoon sun was shining, and there was a recent Time magazine with a feature story on computers siting on the Danish modern coffee table from Scandinavian Designs. Despite the glowing prognostications in the article, we were in agreement that, while personal computers might seem like a good idea, there just couldn't possibly be any practical application in our daily lives.
Up to that point, the only computers I had seen were at Scott Weiss's apartment in Santa Monica, where he used one to keep track of addresses and phone numbers, and at Harvey Susser's home, where he amazed all with a simple quiz program he had written. Beyond that, it seemed that the Luddites of 38 South Knoll Road (my mom and I) were spot-on in their predictions.
The arrival of my first PC in 1992 did little to dispel my backward thinking. It was a gift from my new father-in-law when my first wife and I moved to Coalinga, CA, where I had taken a teaching position at West Hills College. Though it was a hand-me-down, it proudly held sway in the family room of our newly-purchased home, a Symbol of Tomorrow. As I recall, it featured an early version of WordPerfect, a geography program, and a medical surgery game - none of which I knew how to use. Naturally, the whole thing ran on QDOS, Bill Gates' legendary Quick and Dirty Operating System that he had purchased from a friend for $50,000, after boldly promising to IBM that he had written his own. (BTW: If you ever come across a rerun of the documentary, Triumph of the Nerds, on TV, it's well worth watching.)
On a good day, I could turn the computer on and launch the geography program. I played around with the color schemes, looked at maps, zoomed into the city-level, and generally mucked about until the computer froze due to operator error. Then I turned it off, having completed my tech training for the day. Sometimes, I even managed to turn it off in the proper sequence, though not very often.
The word processing program was way over my head, but I did eventually make inroads on the surgery game (which was more geared to practicing physicians than newbies). At the very lowest level, you had to diagnose a patient and determine whether he or she was a suitable candidate for an appendectomy by poking at their abdomen with the mouse as they responded to your query, "Does it hurt here?" I got pretty good at that.
Then you had to prep the patient for surgery, clean the site with iodine, administer anaethesia, and make an incision at the appropriate spot, using the mouse as a scalpel. Naturally, bleeding began at this point - depending on what kind of a hack job you had done - requiring you to cauterize and ligate any bleeding vessels, again with the mouse (I think there is a reason most surgery is not done with mice). Meanwhile, vital signs needed to be monitored and the appropriate drugs and saline administered via the IV drip.
Next, you had to identify the appendix, which, by the way, is a lot harder than finding the appendix in the back of a book. You elevated the organ to the surface of the wound and then --- Actually, I couldn't tell you what happened then, since my patients invariably started circling the drain at that point, if they hadn't done so earlier in the procedure.
Unfortunately, the only way to advance was by trial and error, which seems like a fairly tragic way to learn medicine. The game didn't offer much help, other than the occasional condescending suggestion from the snarky observing physician. Helpful comments like, "Are you sure you want to make the incision there?" or "I believe that's the scrotum and not the appendix, doctor", or "Ladies and gentlemen, your patient has left the building." They say that doctors get to bury their mistakes, but mine were even easier to delete. The program did keep an annoying record of my lamentable patient stats, presumably so that someone playing a QDOS lawyer game somewhere could eventually sue the pants off me.
Not surprisingly, the computer was mostly for show. It announced to visitors that we were a young couple to be reckoned with. It signified that we were digitally aware, even if my real proficiency only extended to finally mastering the highest level of Super Mario Brothers on my Gameboy.
Fortunately, West Hills College offered a two-day training seminar on word processing for technically-challenged teachers such as myself. It's amazing what a little knowledge can do to sweep away the cobwebs of ignorance. I came home after the first session and the computer was no longer my foe. I launched WordPerfect flawlessly. We wrote things together. We selected blocks of text. We formatted paragraphs. We underlined entire sentences. We cut and pasted shamelessly. We italicized like pagans. We seductively revealed formatting marks, then we coyly hid them. Finally, we printed long sample pages and smoked cigarettes in the languid afterglow.
I was no longer a virgin. I had been introduced to the wonderful world of PC productivity. The truth be told, that expression would, at times, turn out to be a cruel oxymoron. Over the years, I would spend countless hours trying to learn how to complete mail merges, format headers and footers, or create labels that actually printed in the space allotted. But, in the end, it was all worth it. I am finally at a point where the computer is my slave. No, I take that back (the computer might be listening). My servant. No. My indulgent and beneficent helper. (Is that okay, H.A.L.?)
Yes, though the heady passions of that first steamy night of WordPerfect have been replaced by more mundane day-to-day productivity, I am not sad. The computer and I have an open marriage of sorts. I try to overlook its quirks, like crashing just before I hit the Save button. In turn, it affords me the opportunity to make new friends in distant lands, such as the helpful tech support folks in Pakistan, who work hard to help massage my shattered nerves into Nirvana. Best of all, the computer even encourages me to download all of my old data into a sexy new hard drive every few years. Try doing that with your spouse and see how far you get...
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